Brandon (part four)

I was escorted out of the building and Brandon was pronounced dead at 4:31 that afternoon. His sister had signed the paperwork and left after and I stood outside under a pavilion and stared up at the unit and Brandon died alone, save for a doctor and coroner.

Death is cavernous. No logic. No solace. No light. Sound echoes and disappears and is drained into the vacuum with all energy and beauty from you. Death is the void. Death is the abyss. The weight of lead and breathing impossible. The choke.

I smoked cigarette after cigarette and I kept trying to go back in to say goodbye but I wasn't allowed. Eventually, I left the hospital and walked into Albany. I stopped crying and feeling and only walked in the slush and mud and the damp and hollow streets. I was alone and the night was cold and cars raced and streetlamps glowed and Brandon was dead. I sat on the wet curb and tried to understand it. I couldn't and shortly before midnight my fingers had grown numb and I had no idea how far I had walked. I called my mother for a ride home.

I sat in a laundromat and waited. I watched the machines spin and the water tumble around and the soap bubble and the lights flicker and I sat in a hard plastic chair alone.

I saw the hours after and Brandon did not. He didn't know this rain or sleet. He didn't know this cold. He didn't know this loss or uncertainty or emptiness. Brandon's body left the Critical Unit and went somewhere else and my body left the Critical Unit and floated heavy on the wind, falling into that laundromat and then into years after.

Black Brandon stayed with me for months.

I smoked pot in the driveway of our apartment as I burned up any good faith between our landlord and myself and I saw him in the yard walking. I would wake in the night and go to the kitchen and I would see him in the kitchen or in the living room or outside and then he would not be there. I questioned my health. He was the first of my friends to die and after a few months had gone by and I was supposed to be over it, I was still seeing him. Hearing him. I don't mean that in any figurative way.

I felt him touch my shoulder before I left one day. I heard him say my name. Black Brandon and Brandon became the same and I saw them and then I did not see them. I began to go for runs as the weather warmed. I began to write a book that I never finished. I began to spend more time at work and I began to make an honest effort to let go. The phone rang once.

I had just come home from work one day in July and the phone was ringing. I went into the kitchen to answer it and then I noticed the phone was not ringing. Not my phone. I looked around me and still the ringing filled the room and the house and I realized it was coming from the back of the house, near the bedroom. I hadn't been in the bedroom in months. I had stayed on the living room floor and kept to the front of the house. It made the loneliness less real. Less impending. I didn't think that he had a phone back there, but I thought that maybe I never knew, because I always just answered this one. I walked back to the bedroom and the house was still. As if exhaling after a good cry. His door was closed and the ringing was inside the room. I turned the brass handle and it was cold on my palm and the floor creaked as I shifted my weight and when I opened the door a wave of stale air swept around me and he hadn't cleaned his room and no one had cared enough to come for his things. The ringing persisted. It was inside the closet. I opened the closet door and there were clothes hanging and boxes on the floor and there was a blue wall phone wrapped up in its cord just inside one of the boxes and the ringing was loud. I felt no fear and as I write this I don't know why. I unwrapped the phone and answered it.

"Hello?"

A living silence. As if someone only listened on the other end.

"Hello?"

It clicked and the line was dead and then it was just an old and unplugged phone. I sat on Brandon's bed and laid down and I didn't cry and I didn't feel as sad.

I don't know if what had happened had or if I only think it did. I know that the phone call brought me peace. I will tell you to this day, a decade later, that Brandon had called and he wanted me to let go and he had wanted peace for me. But, maybe that's just what I need to think. Eventually I saw hours, days, weeks, and years pass and Brandon did not. Eventually I was older than Brandon, and eventually I stopped visiting his grave. I know he isn't there. He's not some ghost, perched atop his grave marker, eating an apple and telling dirty jokes to ignorant passer-by's. He just isn't hanging around anymore. He's a memory and a wonderful memory and I think that's exactly what he'd want to be.